Requiem
by Cadenza at Midnight
Summary: It is not that she wants to be with Jess. Not now, as she is (broken and taped and patched together pieces and she has been breaking since birth, has she not). Literati. She doesn't have him. But she did, she could have, and she hates the ghosts.
1. Prologue: Afterwards

Requiem

Disclaimer: I really want to own "Gilmore Girls." Because I really, really want it to be real. Because I really, really, really want to kiss Jess Mariano. And read his margin notes. And tell him that I fully support his support of Kerouac. Dammit, why don't I ever get what I want?

Author's Note: "Playful banter. Foreplay" belongs to the lovely Airin, whom I have never met and whom I haven't even asked for permission. Her Well-Played, a Rory/Logan story, is a damn sight better than this hunk o' junk, and so my only excuse is that a)my muse made me do it! (and at gunpoint, no less) and/or b)I steal in homage. So, thank you, Airin; you're amazing.

And...sheepish I may actually edit this one. I write fanfiction as...err...something to relax from real writing (I realize this is a terribly unpopular opinion, which is possibly why I don't actually _talk_ to fandom people, I just read and read and read and pretend I'm not addicted). So...err...reviews are quite happy, particularly nice ones that tell me nice long feedbacky things. Because, believe it or not, I might wish I did talk to fandom people...

_Requiem: Prologue  
Afterwards... _

There are a thousand ways it could have been just a little bit different. Perhaps that's why she doesn't want to think about him; that's why she runs in her funny, high-heeled flailing way when she spots him again, why she clutches to Dean, safe Dean, and yells "NO!" over and over again.

The truth is, they cannot fix this. The way it happened it is not reparable, and the way it is now, the strings of her plot have diverged from his. She is dating Logan now, and she does not regret a minute of Logan. She loves Logan.

(Let that be the first thing that is said, as we dive into requiem, that she loves Logan and not Jess and that is how the world works. Boy falls in love with girl. Girl comes to her senses--eventually--and falls in love back. Boy leaves. Girl's heart breaks. Boy's heart breaks. They pick up the pieces and continue on apart.)

So it is not that she wants to be with Jess. Not now, as she is (broken and taped and patched together pieces and she has been breaking since birth, has she not?). Not when she has chosen Dean, again, a thought which half-way makes her stomach turn. Not when she has argued with Logan--playful banter, foreplay--and leaped off a seven-story scaffolding with him, and clutched his hand to her heart. Not now that she has grown _more_. Not now that she has really loved.

But...she wishes, perhaps, that she could have been with him. She sees all the ways that--had they chosen slightly differently, had they shifted one finger more to the other edge of the teetering divides in themselves...they would have been perfect. So she doesn't think about Jess. Because she's moved on, and it hurts too much, when she looks at him, to see the ghosts.


	2. Chapter 1: Ghosts

Disclaimer: I still want Jess Mariano, and I still can't have him. You'd think, if I were Amy Sherman-Palladino, I might not mind because I'd have the next best thing.

Author's Note: If anyone can suggest a better way to pull this style off (without suggesting stupidities, please), I'd love to hear it. Because there's something about it that clunks.

Additionally, I'll probably follow each episode for more than one chapter. But, as always, don't you dare expect anything linear. It doesn't work that way. And there's a whole lot of what-ifs to cover. (Mmmmm...Jess...)

_Chapter 1_

She grows impatient with Paris's rant--Paris is always ranting, and Rory doesn't see the point. Particularly when it's Berkeley versus MIT, and about calculus, no less. Now, if it were a rant about people who dog-ear their pages...or about people who belittle The Velvet Underground...

She isn't thinking about anything particularly important when she lets Paris be swept into Chilton without her. She simply turns about, avoiding the teachers coming in the main gates, and catches a bus for New York City. And she has a glorious day.

It is when she reaches the end of it, the afternoon-cum-evening, that she finds herself on a precarious balance, unsure of herself. She doesn't want to leave, and every action has a ghost of an action behind it. She chooses to act like Rory Gilmore, as she knows she must return to being the Stars' Hollow Cinderella (she is too on edge to find a more apt comparison; besides, she likes the alliteration).

He says: "The sign says Boonesville." And she does not twist her fingers through her hair--though she wants to--and she does not say: "Umm...you know, there's a later bus back. And you haven't even shown me the touristy stuff yet, Mr. Lenny Shepherd." (He would laugh and tell her he didn't do radio. Cop-out stuff.) (And she dearly wanted to see the Met and to show him the Strand.)

Earlier, when he eased up from his bench in the park, he was so close to her that she felt...loved. And then, even then, she did not grab his hand.

She says: "I should go," instead of taking his hand (so many opportunities!) and following the poor tourist downtown to point the poor lout in the direction of 44th.

She gets on the bus.

When his voice comes through the glass, warped, the auditory equivalent of the rippled windows of hundred-year-old buildings--at least, then, she opens the window.

When he says: "Why did you come here?" she sees the two ways it can go. She sees the easy way--for once it has come to her: "Because you didn't say goodbye." She sees the flash of disappointment-guilt-want-...something... in his eyes as he says, "Oh. Bye, Rory," and she bats down the knowledge that the something, the half-smile, the bye-Rory say I Love You. And then she sits on a bus for hours next to a hick spitting into a can.

She sees the easy way, and then she says the hard way, the way she does, with a burst of impatience and embarrassment and anger: "Because I _missed_ you, you idiot!"

His eyebrow quirks. "Oh, so you do want to spend time with me after all."

She colors. "I didn't say that. I merely said that I missed you."

"Which implies the time spent with me was worth the effort."

She has enough sense not to say anything.

And then he reaches up through the open window, and she doesn't know what he wants to do--he doesn't either, maybe he's going to tickle her, maybe he's just reaching up and up and up and he'll come to a stop in outer space and have adventures on his great glass elevator. She doesn't let him touch her. She gets off the bus.

She holds his hand, and they ditch their bags in the convenient shelves in the Strand, on Broadway (and they ride the Subway again--how else are you going to get half way up Broadway?), and when she knows that there's no way in hell she's going to make it back for her mom's graduation (and she does care), they head back to the bus station and find another bus back to Stars' Hollow. She stands there in the bus terminal and puts her arms around him and feels the warmth of his shoulderblade against her face and the feel of his hands all the way around her and the way their tennis shoes touch.

And she gets lucky. The bus is an express.


	3. Chapter 1: Maybes

Disclaimer: Hmm...seems like someone should have figured it out by now. If I were Amy Sherman-Palladino, do you think I would write this badly? And do you think I would ever have let the end of Season 4 happen?

Author's Note: To make the premise a little more clear: all of these things are ghosts. All of these scenarios are coulda-woulda-shouldas that are...hmm...somehow very similar to what was going through my mind watching Season 2 for the first time (I am a sad late-comer to GG, indoctrinating myself with taped eps of season 1 and then jumping right into the middle of 4). In any case, though, because they're ghosts, wishful thinking, in the actual chapters, Rory does what she _doesn't_ do in the episode. Sadly for the whole story, in the S5-Rory-universe, she hasn't actually done these things. But, worse for Rory and better for us, she can see very clearly what would have happened had she done something a little differently. And even luckier for us--after she sees the ghost, she sees where it could have gone, too. Poor kid. It's not her fault that most of the scenarios say she could have married Jess... (And I apologize; my writing still sucks. Someday I'll figure out how to communicate this in a worthwhile fashion...)

_Chapter 1: Maybes__  
(2:21)_

She does have to tell Lorelai that she went to see Jess. Eventually. She keeps telling herself that--eventually--and slides into the back of the auditorium with Sookie and Jackson. "Nice suit," she says.

"Thanks!" Jackson beams. Sookie hushes him and points out that Lorelai is just about to receive her diploma. Rory has never been prouder (except, perhaps, that morning when Jess almost admitted that he missed Luke...), and she and Sookie and Jackson stand up and wolf-whistle and holler. Rory's pretty sure that her grandparents are a little annoyed with the scene, but when her grandmother turns to glare, Rory also spots the tears in Emily's eyes. Rory figures she's wolf-whistling in spirit.

After the ceremony, Lorelai gets two grad pictures with her parents--one with Rory, one without. As much as her grandparents sometimes make her mother's life miserable, Rory figures that this, right now, is exactly what family is supposed to be like.

Of course, once they reach the house and she's standing on the steps with her mother, admitting that she skipped school, she doesn't feel quite the same way.

"You _what_?"

"I cut school and I got on a bus and I don't even know why I did it. I...I have no excuse. I was just standing outside of Chilton, and I don't know, I must have had a stroke or something." She scuffs her toe against the sidewalk and admits to herself, very, very quietly, that she did not have a stroke. Nor did she have any form of disease or ailment. And even more quietly, she admits to herself that she doesn't regret a second of it.

Lorelai just stares at her blankly. She's beginning to get angry. "Rory. Why did you go to New York?"

Well...it's obvious, isn't it? "To see Jess."

"Oh my god! You're me! I can't believe this! My daughter is me!"

There's an argument; Lorelai thinks Jess is no good. Rory, remembering his hands and his almost timid "whatever" and the thing that wasn't quite in his eyes when he asked her why she came, knows better.

She doesn't break up with Dean; she's Rory Gilmore, poster child for literacy, decency, and several other "ee" words, and she doesn't know how. But she isn't surprised when Jess is on the next bus back to Stars Hollow, and when she tells Dean that she went to New York to see Jess, that Jess has come back, and that she doesn't really mind, she's terribly grateful to Dean for doing the breaking up for her.

Because the next time she sees Jess, she remembers the look in his eyes, and the look that could have been in his eyes, and the edge of his smirk when she tells him she missed him...and she doesn't have to remember the quirk at the corner of his mouth, because it's there again. She wants to tell him that it's a very attractive corner, and a very attractive smirk. She wants to touch it.

She kisses him. After he asks her if she wants coffee. After she drinks two cups of it and he teases her for wanting to see him and she reminds him that he was the one who said that, not her, and he _almost_ blushes. After they dance around the subject for a little longer and she watches him serve the other people in the diner and then come back to her, leaning his hands against the counter so that she thinks that his arms are the most beautiful thing she's ever seen. At that point, she figures she's done enough ogling for the day--the corner of his mouth? _come on_--and she leans up to him and kisses him.

He's a much better kisser than Dean.

A hell of a lot of things happen: habits aren't easily broken, and Jess has seventeen years of lying and running to atone for. He doesn't know how to share what's in his head, not even for this girl who makes him..._something_--makes him run out of vocabulary! She doesn't know how to trust, or how to leave well enough alone.

Not even Rory can make Jess stay when Jimmy shows in town. But he has a whole year of her to hold on to, a whole year of hand-holding and kissing and wisecracks about Hemingway and Rilke and Queen. In California, the memories surround him like ghosts.

He comes back.

She's missed him too, and she trusts him (even though she doesn't know how; even though she doesn't want to); she has a whole year of hand-holding and kissing and _finally_, a vocabulary worth listening to, even if he is complaining about Ayn Rand. He tells her he loves her.

She believes him.

(They get married in a little church with a few pretty flowers, and, even though Jess hates dancing, they dance the night away.)


	4. Chapter 2: Phantoms

Disclaimer: See, if I were Amy, this is how an episode would go. As anyone who's ever seen "There's the Rub" knows that it doesn't work this way, the deductive process ought to lead you to deciding that I'm not Amy.

Author's Note: Yay for reviews! I'm still not happy with the writing style, and I have to apologize for wanting to post this so badly that I haven't even given it five minutes to settle, but...I'm enjoying _thinking_ about it, at least, so pretend it's a good read. I figured out how to enable anonymous reviews, so...wahoo, everybody review me?

smile: There's a reason the end of the second chapter 1 rushes...you're absolutely right, but it is what I meant to do. Call it time lapse dreams on Rory's part, or something. :)  
OnLoveInSadness: There are supposed to be two Chapter 1s. :) Look for a second Chapter 2 at some point, too...

Right, and now on to the chapter.

_Chapter 2: Phantoms  
(2:16)_

Rory is having the loveliest dream. She is dreaming that she has the house all to herself, to watch TV and do laundry in her pajamas, order Indian food, and go to bed early. She knows it is a dream because she doesn't even have homework to do, and she can spend whatever free time her night offers rereading Rilke's _Letters to a Young Poet_ and beginning _Northanger Abbey_, the only Jane Austen she hasn't yet touched.

It also has to be a dream because as soon as she has settled down in front of the television with her laundry hamper, the doorbell rings. She's willing to bet that it's Jess; lately, her nightmares have been revolving around them (she firmly quashes the thought that she is all too ready to have these "nightmares").

It's Paris, so the dream ends and she wakes up to an hour of electrochemistry in the company of a stressed-out overachiever. It's not as bad as it could be; Paris will leave soon and she'll get the house back to herself.

Then Jess arrives. Maybe Paris was just an unusual nightmare, because this absolutely has to be a dream--a care package that might (just might) be Jess's idea, a goodly amount of flirting over cold French fries, Paris offering to leave. Rory can almost forgive them both for interrupting her alone night (and she's sure grateful to Paris for getting her to put on some clothes before Jess saw her...the thought of Jess seeing her in her pajamas gives her some images that are very nearly nightmare).

But she's finally absolutely sure she's awake when she realizes that she's _terrified_ of what will happen if she's alone with Jess (more exquisite nightmares) and that she's sure Dean will be terribly upset, so she asks Paris to supper. They discuss Kerouac, Bukowski, and Austen, and Rory's pretty sure that this is a day worth dreaming about later on.

When Dean calls, she's terrified and sick of the alternation between dream and nightmare (she ignores the fact that she has mislabeled Jess as "dream," his staying to supper as "nightmare"). She evicts her supper guests as efficiently as possible, nevermind how lame the excuse "It's getting late" sounds to everyone's ears.

Jess asks: "Do you really want me to go?" (She doesn't; she _does_; she knows she doesn't...God, why can't she just say yes and get on with it?)

She settles for a compromise. "I really...want to avoid a fight with Dean." Jess sighs, nods his assent, picks up his coat.

Half-way to the front door, he calls out "Ow!" and stops.

Rory, impatient, nervous, asks, "What?"

"Ooh! I think I just twisted my ankle. I better go lie down."

She stares at him, annoyed, for a moment. She can push him out the front door (and get some good physical contact in, the traitor part of her that thoroughly enjoys Jess-nightmares points out) and send him away, ending the lovely night and saving peace with Dean. On the other hand, she can clearly see Dean coming up the sidewalk as she sends Jess out the door. What a scene that will make. (And, her mind adds optimistically, if you hide him somewhere, the night won't be over yet...)

"Fine," she says. "Get in my room, hide in my closet. But I'm warning you, if you make as much as a _peep_...I'll put you on the Machine!" She shoves him through the doorway (two Jess-experiences for the price of one) and shuts the door. Paris, for once, is being helpful and stacking the cartons of food and shoving them in the trashcan.

Right on schedule, Dean rings the doorbell. Rory smooths her skirt down, takes a deep breath, and answers the door with as genuine a smile as she can muster. The thought of Jess in her room, waiting for her, reading her books--oh God, she told him to hide in her _closet_! she has _clothes_ in there!--makes an uncomfortable lump in her stomach.

She kisses Dean perfunctorily and follows him to the kitchen. She relaxes a little: he's brought mocha _ice cream_, but Paris is standing guard over the overflowing trashcan and she is reminded of exactly who is ensconced on her bed, ruining her pristine copy of _Franny and Zoey_.

"Dean, you remember Paris, right?"

"Hi, Paris." Dean nods and eyes Rory in a way that is meant to say, _Please get rid of Paris; this would be a perfect time to exercise my newly increased lung capacity._ Rory ignores him.

"You brought me ice cream!" She tries to muster up some enthusiasm. "Paris, you like mocha, right?" She turns away from Dean's half-annoyed look and rummages in the drawer for three spoons.

The only positive side to this situation, as Rory sees it, is that Paris is restraining herself (barely) from running circles around Dean with the conversation. They discuss women's basketball, something none of them know very much about, leaving nice long pauses for eating ice cream.

Once Rory has scraped the bottom of the carton--as close as she will get to licking it with her boyfriend and worst enemy-and-sometime-close friend watching her (and _Jess_ stroking Colonel Plucker and smiling over thoughts of her just beyond the closed door)--she turns her most Rory-like smile on Dean and says, "That was really nice, Dean. Really. Much better than I thought. Nothing ruined. Promise. Come on, let me walk you out." Dean restrains his irritation and follows Rory out the door.

She firmly ignores the half of her brain that is remembering Jess nightmares and lets Dean kiss her for a good minute before pulling away. She smiles again and says, "'Night, Dean," then lets him leave.

Paris coughs delicately as Rory returns to the kitchen. "I should...err...let you get back to your alone night, " she says. Rory doesn't question how she has conveniently forgotten the Jess-flirting and the fact that Jess (a boy! ...not just a boy, Jess) is in her room.

She says, "Thanks for coming, Paris, it was fun! Please, please, please don't stress too much; I _promise_ you'll do fine on the quiz. Really."

"Yeah, I guess so," Paris manages with a small smile. She collects her belongings from the living room and heads out.

Rory waits until she hears Paris's car crunch out of the driveway before opening her bedroom door. She is greeted with: "Geez, what does he do, make you use a scuba tank?" She blushes.

"I don't think you're one to talk, Jess Mariano," she says, offering him a hand up from the nest of her covers. He finds the nearest bookmark (Elijah Wood, on her nightstand) and lays _Franny and Zoey_ down on top of the sheet.

He's studying her, and she finds she can't quite meet his gaze. But she can't let go of his hand, either.

"Read with me?" she says, to break the silence. He picks up Salinger again, and she digs Rilke out of her backpack with her free hand. Then she leads him to the living room and to the couch, hoping he'll ignore the...unmentionables...strewn across the floor.

No such luck. When he mentions that he didn't even have to pay the cost of eBay, she wrinkles her nose and drops his hand to smack him. She finishes sorting her laundry_ very_ quickly, then carries it all to her mother's room before starting the white-T-shirt-with-writing load.

Jess has made himself comfortable on the couch, so she crawls onto the other end and opens her book, tangling her bare feet with his (she doesn't question what happened to his shoes).

She wonders what happens next and realizes that it doesn't matter: all the shadows in front of her belong to her traitor-self, which has taken over her body. Half of them involve kissing Jess (on the couch, up against the table in the entryway, against the washing machine, by the bookshelves in her room)...a few of them involve worse things than kissing Jess. All of them involve the heat of him against her--as it is right now--and a small smile on his face--which is there right now.

None of them are nightmares.


End file.
